On 3/23/07, Mathias Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Sorry, I don't understand this. From my perspective there is no "bickering". The situation is clear. We have NeoOffice that is a nice thing and already can serve a lot of MAC users quite well. My personal opinion is that MAC users would be served best if either NeoOffice joined OOo (and I explained that by pointing out the risks that a fork always has by nature!) or OOo itself created its own MAC version that then should be a "real native" one. No bickering included.
There is bickering. You personally might not be involved, but bickering does exist. Not in this thread per se, (although Jonathon Blake comes close). <Side rant> And why do people type Mac in all caps? It's not an acronym. It's short for Macintosh - which is a type of apple. Linux is typed Linux, GNU, which is an acronym, is typed GNU or Gnu. But Mac should not be in all caps. It's shouting, and IMHO worse than typing M$ instead of MS or Microsoft, which also bugs me. </side rant> I can't speak about the position of Sun wrt. the MAC market but IMHO
that doesn't matter. What matters is the position of the whole OOo project wrt. to that. And fact is that the OpenOffice.org project *is* working on the MAC port, but the resources are somewhat limited. The fact that this is not work paid by a company but volunteer work doesn't make it a bad thing. I hope you agree to that.
Well, you are right, it doesn't make it bad. It just proves that Sun doesn't give a rip about the Mac market. The fact that Sun doesn't even use the OOo port of Mac to make a StarOffice for Mac kind of proves that. It does make sense, since Apple and Sun are direct competitors. (Both make their own hardware with their own operating system. They both make servers, etc..) What it does mean, however, is that the work will be very very slow in coming. Let's be honest here - a very high percent of the work that actually gets done for OpenOffice.org is done by paid people, whether those people are paid by Sun, or Google, or CollabNet, or Novell, or IBM... Very little of the actual coding is done by volunteers, which means that if all the work for the Mac port is done by volunteers it will take a very very long time. In fact, it already has. I was hearing the same "We're much closer to Mac Native status" years ago. Actually, at first it was "Being Mac Native is useless. The X11 port is far superior anyway. There is no need or benefit to going Aqua." I can pull up the records, if you don't believe me. IMHO the MAC and the MAC users would profit from a MAC version of OOo
much more than OOo as a whole would. So it's not the OOo project that is primarily challenged to do something (and this includes Sun, Novell, RedHat and other companies working on the project), it's Apple. Obviously Apple doesn't have the balls to do it as you also stated:
Apple, as a company, has no need whatsoever for OpenOffice.org. Apple has Microsoft Office. Apple has iWork. Apple has AppleWorks. Apple has TextEdit. Apple has NeoOffice. Apple does not need OpenOffice.org. Apple is in the process of making iWork a direct competitor to MS Office. Pages is kind of a cross between Publisher and Word. Keynote is in many ways superior to PowerPoint, but has a ways to go in others. And the Tables program that they will release with iWork 07 will be a direct competitor with Excel. They already include Mail to displace Outlook, Safari to displace IE, and TextEdit to displace Word/Wordpad. They don't need OpenOffice.org. Apple, as a company, doesn't need OpenOffice.org. Apple makes most of its money selling music and mp3 players. Software is pretty low on the income list for Apple. It goes the iPod, iTunes, Computer Hardware, iPod Accessories, Computer Accessories, Operating Systems, Software. They make more money selling earphones than they do selling first party software. And, believe it or not, they make money selling MS Office for Mac. They sell it online and in their stores. They get the retail mark up profit. There is no motivation for Apple to make OpenOffice.org Mac native. There *should be* motivation for OpenOffice.org to make OpenOffice.org Mac native. Macs have much more of a market share for desktops and laptops than Linux ever will. Especially laptops. If OpenOffice.org wants ODF to become a widely used and accepted standard, there is a motivation for it to run on Mac, and to run to the level that Mac users will actually want to use it. As a command line batch converting Linux user, one might not understand the mindset of a Mac user that will pay an extra $150 just to have their laptop black instead of white. Looks matter to a Mac user. The interface matters to a Mac user. Intuition matters to a Mac user. Having to install X11 and interface with these weird floating ugly menus and lack of font support and odd looking folders and file structures and just plain wrong keyboard shortcuts.... It's way to much for a Mac user to put up with just to save $150 bucks or even $400 if you don't go Student/Teacher. Which, btw, by the time Office 2008 comes out, will likely be $150 for the Home & Student, so even those whose conscience won't let them buy the Student edition when they aren't students, will no longer have that problem. Apple has the best experts for the work to do and IMHO a hand full of
developers would suffice. I wouldn't be surprised if the OOo project gladly supported any initiative from Apple's side.
You are right - Apple does have the best experts for the job. But they are too busy working on Leopard, iWork, iLife, the iPhone, AppleTV, iTunes, the iPod.... to bother with something that, financially speaking, they have no need of. Let's say, just for a second, that Apple took the time, money and effort, to make a perfect Mac port of OpenOffice.org. Completely Aquafied, completely integrated into the menu structure, keyboard shortcuts, fonts, GUI, the whole shebang. And, let's say, they started shipping every single new Mac with MacOOo pre-installed. Would they lower the price of Macs because of it? No. Would they sell more Macs because of it? Probably not. They actually use the fact that Macs can run Microsoft Office as a selling point. www.apple.com/geta*mac*/*office*.html Would they even get the money back that they invested in porting the program? I don't see how. And then you have to add in maintenance. If Apple ports OOo - they will have to be the ones, (with their "experts") to keep it updated. Patches, support, upgrades.... It will get very expensive for them. Plus, the lost income from possibly selling less copies of MS Office and/or iWork.... It just doesn't make any sense for Apple to pay for this. There is no "bottom-line" reason for it. Apple doesn't hate Microsoft. They even use the fact that "Mac does Windows" and "Mac runs Office" as selling points. Selling points that work. Nobody works on software "out of the goodness of their heart". They did
it to scratch their own itch. And to make it clear: there's nothing bad about that. At the end that's what Open Source software is all about.
Agreed. Apple just doesn't have an itch to scratch in this game. -- - Chad Smith http://www.chadwsmith.com/
